In many types of network today, connections may be provided in the form of tunnels. Tunnelling may be used to achieve protocol independence, or to provide a secure path through a network that is not trusted from a security point of view. Tunnelling techniques may be used together with protection switching, in which a secondary path is provided for one or more primary paths. In the case of failure of the primary path or paths, the traffic on the affected path or paths will be switched to the secondary path.
In all areas of society there is an increasing desire to be environmentally friendly. One important aspect of this is to make present applications more energy efficient. Preferably power consumption should be reduced without reducing the performance of the application as perceived by the user.
For example, Central Processing Units (CPU) can be made more and more energy efficient today, even with a high processing power. There is a desire also to achieve more energy-efficient communications networks, including different types of networks, such as core networks, access networks and/or local networks such as Local Area Networks (LAN), business networks, etc.